The Swedish
landscape is rather more austere than the richly flowered and variegated
landscape to be found in most parts of Britain, where chalk, limestone and
other, softer, rocks allow a greater profusion of topographical shapes and plant
varieties to flourish. Much of Sweden struggles to survive on granite, outcrops
of which can be seen in many of that country's towns and cities, unexpectedly
thrust to the surface, and a constant reminder of how much geology still shapes
destiny. Such outcrops also produce a proliferation of islands and skerries
around the coast, notably just outside Stockholm where there are more than
17,000 islands in the archipelago, many of them inhabited, at least during the
summer months. Yet even with its more restricted flora and fauna, the
Scandinavian landscape is perhaps even more beautiful and haunting. 'Fjords make
philosophers of us all," Ibsen once wrote, about his native Norway.

Like many others, I first became aware of the Scandinavian life and culture
through the films of Ingmar Bergman, and the austerities of his landscapes and
characters struck a chord, or perhaps more accurately suggested a range of
emotions and aspirations unavailable in English culture at the time. (The
transitory happiness of the Baltic island idyll in Bergman's 1953 film,
Summer with Monika, has recently been evoked again in the English
publication of Tove Jannsson's exquisite The Summer Book. This was
originally written in 1972, and the translation by Thomas Teal has already been
reprinted four times in Britain in 2003, its first year of publication. Jannsson,
most famous for her children's books, is Finnish of course, though her summer
island is also in the Baltic.)

Partly as a
result of these early influences, I have been a fairly frequent visitor to
Scandinavia over the years, and find that the landscape and culture there
continue to exert a particular spell, in unexpected, and almost Utopian ways
especially for someone as urban as myself. Just one telling example of the
cultural difference between Sweden and Britain is that their phrase for the
welfare state is folkhemmet, ‘the people's home’. While always on the
lookout for Swedish literature in translation, and finding much of great
interest and enjoyment, there is one writer who it seems to me should be
regarded as one of the greatest and most distinctive voices in European
literature: the poet, Tomas Transtromer. Fortunately Bloodaxe Books have
recently expanded and re-published Transtromer's New Collected Poems
(2002), ably translated by Robin Fulton, and a book to keep close by, whatever
the topography, and whatever the weather.

Transtromer was born in Stockholm in 1931 and is today one of Sweden's most
translated poets, though still much less recognised than he deserves to be. By
profession a psychologist, his work is transfused with a respect and love for
people in all their predicaments and difficulties. In Sweden he has been called
‘the buzzard poet’ because he seems to fly above the everyday world, observing
with detached but sympathetic detail the landscape and the people in it; the
paintings of Chagall often come to mind when reading him. The cover of the new
Bloodaxe edition principally consists of one of Sirkka-Lilsa Konttinen's
memorable black and white photographs, Snow Angel, an aerial photograph
of a cleared patch of snow in a pine forest, which seems to resemble the shape
of an angel's body, head and wings. With Transtromer we are in the same company
as Rilke and Shelley, other poets of angels and ascension

The
dream-like experience of flying (as well as endless falling) recurs again and
again in Transtromer's poetry. One of his early poems, Prelude, opens
with the line, ‘Waking up is a parachute jump from dreams', and this sense of
falling into the world each morning as if from some distant planet, is found
throughout his work. Like Shelley's Adonais, Transtromer's subjects often
feel that they have awakened from the dream of life, and the constant inversion
of dream-time and reality, of night and day, of the horizontal and vertical
worlds, is an ever-present theme of this intense yet quietly patient writer. A
number of Transtromer's poems often suggest a photographic imagination, in which
light and dark are hauntingly transposed, as in the beautiful opening image of
the poem, The Couple: 'They switch off the light and its white
shade/glimmers for a moment before dissolving/like a tablet in a glass of
darkness.’

Not
only do people fall into darkness when they go to sleep, they correspondingly
fall to earth again each morning, into this bright world. There are other times,
though, when it is the green depths of the Baltic waters which seems to offer
other worlds of experience too, mostly associated with forms of weightlessness
and forms of music. Transtromer's specific interest in the qualities of music -
the way it seems to sweep through the world, to shape emotions and leave
generations moved, and yet to be invisible and leave the material world
untouched - is philosophically profound and affecting. In another one of his
most beautiful images, in the poem Allegro, he describes music as being
like a glass house through which great stones are hurled, yet which leave the
panes unbroken. In a more recent poem, Lugubrious Gondola No.2- not in
the New Collected Poems - Transtromer writes that, 'Liszt has written
down some chords that are so heavy/they ought to be sent/ to the mineralogical
institute in Padua for analysis./Meteorites/too heavy to rest, they can only
sink and sink through/ the future right down/ to the years of the brownshirts.'
Particular periods of European history, culture and human consciousness are
often carefully unravelled in a number of the longer poems.

Many
poems open or dose with an evocation of some transitional state of
consciousness, either between sleeping and waking, or in one of those moments
when someone can literally forget who he or she is. In the poem, The Name,
the driver of a car who has pulled over to the side of the road to catch some
sleep on a long journey, awakes in a heart-stopping state of panic about their
own identity, relieved very quickly to realise that 'My name comes like an
angel. Outside the walls a trumpet signal blows (as in the Leonora overture) and
rescuing footsteps come smartly down the overlong stairway. It is I! it is I!1
This occurs only feet away from a busy road where traffic glides past oblivious
to the human crisis described; something similar happens in Robert Lowell's
Skunk Hour as I recall. The coexistence of the fragile interior human world
with the often brute facts of material and historical indifference is a theme
constantly pursued in the writer's work.

Transtromer is the creator of unexpected images of apparently artless simplicity
and staying power, possessing a unique voice full of understanding for human
bewilderment and wonder. His is not an urban world, but one of forests, empty
country roads and Baltic shipping channels, though also occasionally of African
villages and hot, barren rooms. Life is a series of transitional states of
consciousness and occasional moments of epiphany, but it is also at times both
beautiful as well as mysterious. The music of the great humanist 19th century
European composers - Beethoven, Schubert, Haydn in particular - shapes
Transtromer's life and experience, and it is the miracle of such music, as with
his poetry, that its material presence is so weightless and ethereal, yet it
also, paradoxically, contains such extraordinary power, along with an ability to
transform the human and material world in astonishing ways. He is a poet to take
seriously, because he introduces us to a new, though consistent, moral world and
landscape every time he writes.